My space was a little hollow without Alice

I moved to another dar in the Medina, I don’t remember now how I found it, word of mouth I think. It was more within my budget, owned by a Moroccan family this time, filled with light, mosaics, fountains, cats galore, soft-footed family, shy smiles and warm welcomes. I was the only guest and each morning, I breakfasted alone with the cats, marvelling that orange juice, a croissant and a sprig of mint could look so magnificent on a blue tiled table with a shaft of sunlight filtering through the latticed rooftop.

Travelling Solo At Last

I need to say something here about travelling solo. I am embarrassed to tell you how challenging I found it to be completely on my own. I didn’t expect myself to feel the way I did. After all I had craved it. A space free of responsibility for someone else being hungry, hot or happy or not so.

This journey had been part of my big Unilateral Declaration of Ownership. Owning the situation and owning the solution. And part of the solution had been to get away - right away. Imagine that for a cure - when family and physicians said, “Take your passport, stand not about wringing your hands, but GO!”

Perhaps it was because I hadn’t planned on Morocco. But that was serendipity, part of the adventure. How many other people set off for Turkey and land in North Africa? I had stepped out of my life. I could go bonkers, eat ice-cream, have serial affairs, write poetry, sleep in all day, party all night and no-one would know.

Yet I Just Felt Wobbly and Wonky

All I felt like was finding a cafe and reading my book. Where was the audacity I’d had at twenty-one? Who was the intrepid traveller of maturity who had, in the last few years, been to Afghanistan, Laos, Tibet, Borneo? What the hell was my problem? I was like a child discovering again. Of course I don’t remember what it is like to be a child discovering, but that’s the only way I can describe it. Discovering my parameters. I was scared, so terribly insecure. Do men feel like this? Ever? And added to that, I was disappointed in myself that I felt that way.

Pets Make Good Travelling Companions

I closed my eyes. Perhaps a four-footed companion. Travels with a Donkey. Fez had a surfeit of those. Get behind me RLS. Those ideas take time and in any case Mike gave me a donkey in the Sudan thirty years earlier, I could not get it to move in any direction even when I got off and tried to pull it along.

When I opened my eyes, the cats were all regarding me. I could just stay in Fez. It was a perfectly legitimate idea. But the cats looked malevolent, squeezing their pupils as if to dislodge me from their world and my own craved security.

Escaping Immediate Decision Making

Trying to get my stakes in the ground that first morning on my own, instead of thinking about where I would go in the coming weeks, my mind went back to another perennial problem. How to be self-sufficient financially on my return to Australia in several months?

Like I was on a desert island and worrying about what I would do after I was rescued rather than addressing the need for water and a coconut.

I didn't have to look far for inspiration. There I was surrounded by straws. I pictured a little shop in Sydney; tiles, textiles and tagines. I’d wear a caftan and Mike could grow the long beard I had always hated, wear a jellabah like he did in the Sudan, and pour out the peppermint tea.

Clutching at a Project

I was delighted with myself. A project. I made enquiries and had no problem finding a manufacturer of Moroccan tiles. He was delighted to see me. Many people, he assured me, had made a great deal of money in Australia importingfrom him.

A container, no less, that was the only way to go otherwise it would be too expensive. There would be no problem filling a container for my new friend had not only tiles and mosaics, but a cousin who made carved wooden doors and screens, an uncle with a good line in fountains. It so happened his wife’s father owned the very best tagine pottery in Fez. Over lunch we talked of family and finding out I had four daughters and unmarried at that, he said immediately he could supply husbands, maybe even four brothers. And I myself, I was travelling alone? He could squeeze them all in a container, ready-made, I had only to supply required sizes…

"Come back tomorrow," he said, "We'll talk some more."

No trouble filling a container - a new business opportunity awaited me and new opportunities galore

Some Ideas Are Best Left Behind

It was evening by the time I got back to my dar. The cats eyes shone round in the dark.“It’s OK,” I said softly, “I’m going in the morning.”

Somewhere on the road to total contentment in a container, I had also found courage, or at least enough of it to travel in my first Grand Taxi and after that there was no turning back.

Night Writers!

Some nights just as I drop off to sleep, words roll into my head. My heart sinks, I know this sensation. This is not what my mother called the witching hour, around 3 am, when the gremlins call. That is the stuff of bank balances, ignominy and indebtedness. This is a new affliction. Well new, but now aged enough to be a familiar. It started not long after I began to write my first book.

They show up individually, lone footloose forerunners

But that’s it, I’m done for. I hold my breath; the corps is on its way. With centrifugal force, they arrive: words multiplying, gathering speed, aligning and coalescing.

I don’t know which sense to nominate. I don’t hear the words, I can’t see them, yet there is nothing ethereal about this transmission, they rattle my skull, insistent, teasing and robust.

Sleep is unthinkable

Some nights, I greet them with wondrous joy. Phrases and couplings that have eluded me by day are child’s play now. Other nights, I groan because if the muse has insomnia, it will be a long night for me.

I reach for my notebook to capture dreamtime’s glossary and try to think what I have eaten or imbibed, what I have done or not done, to summon the word brigade. If I knew, perhaps I could sell it as a cure for writer’s block and having triggered battalions; make another fortune if I could find the remedy and send them all back to barracks and the bookshelf.

Gill Shaddick

The Writer's Journey

I did not start my life in Sydney. The journey to Australia was a blustery passage, boisterous and blessed. Pausing in many countries, I unwittingly traded scraps of my heart for other shards of exotic savvy and grit. I enjoy writing now: examining those exchanges of spirit and musing on my arrival at this point in time.